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A Shiite Muslim political leader said Friday that rumors were circulating of an impending coup attempt against the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and warned that "we will not allow it." A new government would mean "canceling the constitution, canceling the results of the elections and going back to square one . . . and we will not accept that," he said. Amiri is also a top official in the Badr Organization, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is the leading member of a coalition of Shiite political parties governing...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A suspected mastermind of last week's devastating attack in Musayyib was captured during a raid by Iraqi forces in which two of his associates were killed, police said Saturday. Musayyib's police chief, Lt. Col. Ahmed al-Shammari, told the Dubai-based Al Arabiya television that the suspect was captured in a raid in the nearby town of Jarf al-Sakhr but he did not say when it took place. The prisoner, who was not identified, confessed to having stolen a tanker truck, then to taking it to Musayyib to kill "the biggest number of people," al-Shammari said. He did...

MUSAYYIB, Iraq (Reuters) - Stricken townspeople swept away the wreckage of a fuel truck bomb that killed 98 people south of Baghdad as three more suicide car bombers struck the Iraqi capital on Sunday in a relentless new campaign. The overnight attack which devastated the highway town of Musayyib was the deadliest since the new Iraqi government took power in April and the highest death toll from a single car bomb since 125 people were killed in February in Hilla, also south of Baghdad. Saturday's bombing prompted denunciations of the authorities in parliament and calls for local militia to take...

A fuel tanker detonated near a gas station south of Baghdad and killed 58 people, a bloody incident police are calling an attack. The strike -- which occurred in Musayyab, in a volatile stretch in Babil province about 45 miles south of the capital -- also wounded 86 people, police said. Police say the blast destroyed a neighboring apartment complex and damaged a Shiite mosque and surrounding businesses. Violence earlier in day Before the tanker explosion, three British soldiers were killed early Saturday in hostile action in southern Iraq and suicide bombers killed at least 10 people, officials said. The...

At least 54 people have been killed in a bomb attack near a mosque in the town of Musayyib, about 60 km (40 miles) south of Baghdad. At least 80 are reported to have been injured in what police say was a suicide bombing. The attack follows the killing of three British soldiers by a roadside bomb earlier on Saturday. The troops were attacked in central Amarah in the south-east of the country early in the day.

Families' search for their loved ones ends in a gym filled with bodies from mass graves. Ed Vulliamy reports The silence and afternoon heat in the school gymnasium at Musayyib is broken by a sudden wail of grief beyond consolation. Nuria Jasen Shana has found her son at last. The quiet had been that of death: the gym is filled with some 200 reassembled and partly clothed skeletons, wrapped in white cloth sheeting, from what was yesterday emerging as potentially one of the biggest and most gruesome mass grave sites of victims slaughtered by the regime of Saddam Hussein. Jasen...